Manifesto for Teletubbies

It made Mrs Rigby smile.

From Nabidana, via JohnWardinMedway

Jim Greenhalf likens the original to something a little different.

It reminds me of the kind of Communist art, call it social unrealism, favoured by Joseph Stalin: bright, sunny landscapes with smiling peasants in collectively-owned rippling wheatfields; the strong arms of bronzed industrial workers; the excitement of electricity pylons.

Only, in the picture on the cover of Labour's manifesto the cosy Beatrix Potter fields are unmarked by either electricity pylons or wind turbines. There they stand: the ideal white nuclear family, without an iPhone between them: mum holding the baby, dad standing with son, gazing into what looks like a nuclear explosion of a sunrise. In the far distance the silhouette of a city on a hill. The caption is: A Future/ Fair for all.

Wait a minute...isn't this picture of an England on which the sun does not set reminiscent of the picture Winston Churchill painted in his Finest Hour speech of June 18, 1940, just before the Battle of Britain?

...If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world move forward into broad, sunlit uplands...

It's a picture of the future in the guise of the imagined past, how things used to be before Windrush docked, before Yorkshire's mill owners imported all that cheap labour from North West Pakistan, before the egregious European Union opened its borders and opened up Blair's Britain to the wondrous benefits of over-population, religious intolerance and cultural diversity.

It's a future devoid of the social anxieties of the present. In short it's a picture of Peter Pan's Never Never land, where no one grows old, needs emergency hospital treatment or the assistance of the police or social workers. A future where youngsters are not abused and killed, where families are functional, crime is low, the weather is always sunny and the trains run on time.

Go over there and read the rest of his blog piece, and then see if you agree.

Mrs R agrees that the picture is a con, a lie, an ideal that will never, ever be possible.

She also notes that the image doesn't include a single house, no roads, no railways - nothing. It's empty of everything except gently undulating small fields with a bit of blue flax and some oil seed rape - but no tractors, and no livestock.

In short the image is nothing more than a cartoon of a Utopian idyll, attempting to mimic and invoke thoughts of Blake's green and pleasant land, without the mills. Because in Labour's La-la land nobody works, nobody needs to get anywhere and nobody needs to do anything except have a nice day in the country - whilst looking east, to see a rising sun resembling that of the Japanese military flag.

You'd think, wouldn't you, they'd have made a better visual reference to Britain, but no, they couldn't even bring themselves to do that.

h/t to EU Referendum for the original link.

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